125×125 The Next Step

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Working with hundreds of startups, various patterns eventually become obvious. One common pattern is wrapped around the common refrain of mentors to entrepreneurs, “focus“. The actual pattern is a bit more complex. It goes like this: 1. You have an idea. It may feel fully formed, but it’s half-baked. You know enough about the problem and just enough about the customers to...

Earlier this year I had a most amazing experience, traveling to India to meet the President of the Tibetan government in Exile, the Speaker of the House, the Chief Justice of their Supreme Court and his holiness, the 14th Dalia Lama. One of the take aways from this trip was the Tibetan attitude about the present and the future, first shared by Lobsang Sangay, the current President. It goes like...

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World continues my research into wealth inequality and the real-world workings of capitalism. This book is the story primarily of four men: Norman, Strong, Moreau, and Schadt, the heads of the central banks of the UK, U.S., France, and Germany in the 1910’s through 1940’s. These are the men who restructured the financial world at the end of...

Last week was my sixth consecutive SOCAP in San Francisco. If you’ve never been, SOCAP is the largest impact investing event in the world. Over 3,000 attendees. Hundreds of speakers. Big and messy, but one place where you can meet 50 people in a week, all working toward the same goal of improving the planet. The impact above is the pile of cards I collected during the week. I stare at...

Continuing my series of book reports on economics, I was walking through my public library when the title War and Gold caught my eye. The book explains (in far too much detail) the history of money over the last 500 years, starting with the Spanish exploitation of the New World and the subsequent flood of silver into Europe and continuing century by century to the Volker/Regan solution to...